


she aches for it

by theElsker



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-09 15:55:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19890451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theElsker/pseuds/theElsker
Summary: He says his name is Silus. Lt. Carrie Boyd tells him she doesn’t care.





	she aches for it

**Author's Note:**

> Legum servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus - We are slaves to law and order so that we may be free

He says his name is Silus.

Lt. Carrie Boyd tells him she doesn’t care.

Informing your prisoner you do not give a flying fuck what his name is when you need information from him is not recommended strategy by the NCR. However, this is not a standard prisoner, and Lt. Boyd is long past formalities.

Colonel Hsu instructs her to interrogate him. Earn his trust if she can. It is all she can do to keep from laughing in Hsu’s face. She wants to kill him the moment she meets him. He is long overdue for a bullet in his heart.

It is a strange little dance they do. He cannot go back to the Legion, and he cannot be released. She wants to hurt him. Push the cold barrel of her gun against his neck and drive her knife in so deep she has to pull it out the other side. 

Most days it is hard to remember exactly why NCR rules are a good idea.

He is intelligent – that much is apparent. He had been a centurion. Well-respected. _Feared_. The prospect of death does not frighten him. Her threats of violence and pain do not intimidate him. Were he any other many she might find his adherence to his beliefs almost admirable. There are few who would preserve their faith when facing defeat in the face.

But he is not another man. She lights cigarette after cigarette, even throws in a beer or two to guzzle down for good measure. She considers going to Morales for some chems just to be perverse, but even she knows she has to draw the line somewhere.

Besides, the cigarettes have the desired effect after a few goes.

He cannot stand them. There is no ventilation in interrogation room and the stench lingers for days. It clings to him and to everything else. He spits at her feet when she offers him one.

And still, he does not talk.

* * *

She was not always this hard.

And even she would admit she does always recognize herself. She is friendly with Major Dhatri, who often offers to walk with her around the camp at sunset. But she sees little more than the ending of another day and the long stretch of night until the sun rises again. She has stopped flinching at the bodies of comrades as they were carried through the gates of McCarran, the blood that drips and smears on the floor of the infirmary. There is a growing mass of recovered dog tags in Hsu’s office waiting to be sorted.

She remembers the hopes she once had for herself. And she did fairly well in the beginning. 

Her first post had been at Camp Golf, before stints at Alpha and Forlorn. She finally ended up at Camp McCarran when she showed an aptitude for extraction information for prisoners. Without violence. It pleased her superiors enough to have her promoted to Lieutenant.

Powder gangers, Fiends, and a few Khans make their way to her, and she separates them out easily. Being as high as Helios One makes it rather hard for them to keep their mouths shut when the questions begin. She has her reports filed within the day for Hsu to review.

However legionnaires, she is discovering, are a different breed entirely.

And soon, she is long past caring whether or not he has information to give.

* * *

They have been reduced to sitting across from each other, gazes fixed in contempt until one of them breaks. It is usually she who speaks first, but heaven help her if she does not get the last word in as well.

It is like this for months. 

The other soldiers laugh at her. She is a babysitter under the guise of handling policing duties. Hsu has placed her at the back of the base, where piles and piles of intelligence sit spread over her desk. She spends most of her waking hours sorting through the papers. Most comes to naught.

So the interrogation continues.

Her insults against him evolve to insults against the Legion. He is still arrogant, but it is nothing more than a deathclaw caught in a trap of its own making. And it is not long before she realizes why he allowed himself to be captured.

He does not fear death.

But he wishes to live.

It is nighttime when she goes to see him again. He ignores her questions and insults her, the NCR, and her gender all in one breath. She humors him when he asks how she could have joined such a frail, crippled organization as the NCR.

_Legum servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus_ , she says.

And that, she knows, he can understand.

The phrase is Latin. She had found it on a computer in Captain Curtis’ office when hers short-circuited a week past. The captain had offered to help her sift through the reports, allowed her to commandeer his office. Peculiar to think that the captain was fond of old languages, he is not one she would have pegged as an academic sort.

The room is silent and her words hang in the air. His eyes snap to hers and they regard each other in the muted light. And for a moment, so brief she almost misses it, they are equals.

When Corporal Hornsby rushes into Curtis’ office at noon the next day, she is knee-deep in backlogged intelligence out of the Strip. The prisoner, Hornsby declares breathlessly and wide-eyed, says he wishes to speak with her.

She is almost positive that is not the phrase the centurion used when asking for her, but it is the first time he has ever requested her presence, so she goes.

There is a spy at McCarran.

He watches her carefully as he says this. It is calculated, deliberate. And she keeps it to herself. She dares not trust the word of a legionnaire over a member of the NCR. And yet the information gnaws at her, his words twisting themselves over and over in her head until she begins to observe every soldier that passes through the gates of the camp.

She would not be surprised in the least if he has fed her false information. Except that she had already begun to see a pattern in the reports that land on her desk. The Legion has predicted their every move for the past six months. The NCR has not been able to conduct a routine patrol anywhere east of the 88 without running into a Legion raiding party.

She does not think much of the threat until she runs into Corporal Sterling some days later. He mentions a strange light in the radio tower that flickers a few minutes past midnight every couple nights.

She returns to the prisoner a week later, monorail secure and Captain Curtis under arrest.

Hsu has commanded her to thank the prisoner. 

She, of course, will do no such thing.

* * *

Then, when Caesar’s Legion falls at Hoover Dam, he does not speak for weeks.

A part of her rejoices in his misery, in the way he sits lifelessly, staring blankly at the walls. He is no longer the man he once was. He wears a standard issued NCR outfit; all remnants of his previous life gone.

She knows what it means to be alone in the world save for the soldiers that pass through McCarran. She has a husband, but it is rare that she thinks on him. She doubts he has thought on her in years.

So she says nothing.

Celebrations last for a month and most of McCarran takes leave to the Strip. She goes at the request of Hsu and drinks herself into a stupor. The NCR has defeated the only real threat in the Mojave, the only serious threat in the west.

The land is theirs for the taking.

Sleep still eludes her. The slamming of doors still makes her jump. And the silence in the night is still deafening. She wanders the halls of McCarran, ignoring the offers of late night gambling from the other soldiers. Sometimes she walks past his cell in the early morning hours. He is often in the same place she leaves him the night before, eyes so blank she wonders if there is anything left inside.

* * *

They come together in the night when most of McCarran is asleep.

For a brief moment she loses the thread of sanity, so furious she cannot even see him clearly as she begins to break in front of him. His hand snakes out and wraps around her throat, squeezing tight and cutting off her words, before dragging her towards him.

This kiss is not a gentle one. It is lips and tongues and teeth demanding and fierce against each other.

His hands slip to her ass, jerking her against his body. Her hands are grabbing at his hair, curling the locks around her fingers and yanking. When her fingers eventually find his shoulders, his chest, his hips, she digs her fingernails in deep. She wants to tear him apart, make him bleed. He seems to have the same idea, for the way his hands grasp at her waist is likely to leave bruises.

It is mere moments before he is pulling at her again, the rough material of his pants scrapes against her thighs, her own pants pushed somewhere near her ankles. She is writhing underneath him, her legs wrapping around his waist and letting herself grind against him, his cock pulsing between them. 

His hips snap forward without warning and he pushes into her.

It is only moments before they are struggling, and she is shoving at his bulk, maneuvering her much smaller body around so he is forced to flip in order to keep himself buried inside.

Then she is on top and it takes her breath away. She has marked him, dug her nails into his skin until she can see the tiny crescent marks on his chest and down the slopes of his shoulder. She can tell he has never allowed a woman on top of him before this moment and the thought fills her with a strange sense of satisfaction.

A hand, cold on her burning skin, lands on the curve of her hip and urges her forward. She shakes her head and holds herself there until the flex of his hips nearly makes her cry out. She can feel every inch of him inside her, making her feel something she hasn’t in years.

His other hand moves in between them, pinching her where it aches.

She curses and her hips buck forward without any sort of rhythm. Her gasps echo in the small room and he answers in muttering Latin. She grabs his hair again and silences him by shoving her tongue into his mouth. 

When her back slams against the cold hard tile, he moves inside of her so fast that for a brief agonizing moment all she sees is black. He is grunting, low and hard. His teeth find the side of her neck, the soft skin at shoulder, her breasts.

He is not gentle, and she does not want him to be.

But she begins to spasm around him, she knows she has crossed a very perilous line.

* * *

He finally talks.

Hsu has promised him eventual freedom. A few weeks longer in McCarran, perhaps, before the NCR ships him east.

It is too late for much of the information that falls from his lips. But he gives the locations of safehouses, the codes to dismantle bombs scattered all across the desert, the names of high ranking centurions.

She stays away for a week, pretending that she has other duties to attend to. She does, actually, have other duties though even she knows that she could easily give them to a subordinate. Corporal Hornsby is desperate for advancement, she knows.

But staying away does not stop it from happening again.

The second time he is waiting, shoving her into the wall the moment she walks through the door. He grabs at her hips, hoisting her high enough that her feet dangle in the air. His mouth is on hers in moments, bruising and rough, and her teeth close around his tongue. His hand fumbles for her belt, pulling at it until she pushes his hand aside and begins to undo the clasps herself. He busies himself with rolling his hips into hers, fitting himself between her legs.

And Boyd is not even embarrassed when she whimpers as he pushes into her.

Her hands are frenzied when they find the hot skin of his chest, the hard lines of his shoulders, the rough scratch of week old stubble. She kisses him until her mouth hurts. He surges against her, her back striking the wall again and again.

She unravels quicker this time, her teeth scraping against his jaw and legs trembling. He follows soon, his groans low and thick in her ear. They slip to the ground, a jumble of limbs and gasping breaths.

The taste of shame and guilt lay in wait at back of her throat.

But as she lies in disarray on the cold tile of the cell, she has never felt more alive.


End file.
